Bomber, p.48
Bomber, page 48
For Löwenherz was still in his assigned sector right over the beacon. Other pilots, like Himmel and even Redenbacher, had disobeyed the standing orders and followed the bomber stream along its route to the target. Löwenherz had not done that. He had patrolled his sector and obeyed implicitly the orders of his Controller, August Bach. Now Bach called him and told him that he had a four-motor Tommi.
‘Announcement: a big car. Order: steer 300 degrees.’
‘That’s clear,’ said Löwenherz. He increased his speed to overtake the Tommi before he was out of the radar range of his sector.
On the anti-aircraft cruiser Held ‘Admiral’ Pawlak and his K3 had had an eventful night of the sort that Pawlak had predicted. Now he reminded his friend of his prediction for the eighth time that evening. From the moon-rimmed cumulus to the south-east came the sound of a plane. Then other planes.
‘From the south-east,’ said Pawlak. ‘Why from the south?’
‘Night fighter.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘He’s firing. He’s got him.’
‘Got him?’ scorned Pawlak. ‘Lost him, you mean.’ He danced a little mime in which he threw a shell upon the loading tray, swung the rammer, spun the elevation wheel and the traverse and fired the gun. Klaus watched him dolefully.
The alarm buzzer made them rush back into their turret. Pawlak banged his elbow on the balancing-spring cover. Klaus smiled to himself.
In the fifty-five minutes that it had taken Lambert to fly from the German convoy one hundred miles to the target and back again the convoy had sailed only nine nautical miles along the coast – although the Held had done a little more than that, for it was now a mile ahead of the convoy instead of at its very rear.
Lambert’s evasive movements had brought him well north of the Flight Plan. Not even the edge of the bomber stream passed over Scheveningen. So the only blip on the Held’s Würzburg was Creaking Door, until Löwenherz came creeping up behind them.
‘Fire!’ It was radar-controlled firing and twelve of the guns were 10.5s like the one that Pawlak manned. The explosions made a straight-line pattern of stars in the air. The radar computer purred smoothly as it corrected the sighting so that the next salvo would compensate for the speed of the aircraft. The pointer moved and the gunners followed it. The guns fired in salvoes, so it was no advantage that Pawlak loaded at almost twice the speed of all the others. He waited. Pawlak only did it to demonstrate to his friend Klaus Munte the way he wanted the loading done in future.
That no better rate of fire was achieved by Pawlak’s haste made the accident especially tragic. There was little for the naval surgeon to do. ‘That damned breech has made as neat a job of amputation as I ever saw.’ He clipped the veins and sewed up the wrist as best he could and let Pawlak sink into a deep, morphia-induced sleep.
Klaus Munte would not open the breech. The Leutnant in charge was about to insist that Munte did it but finally relented and did it himself. When they did open it the unused shell was difficult to remove. It was glued into the mechanism by an unrecognizable substance like raspberry jam.
Radar-controlled flak always bursts in patterns, one burst for each gun in the battery. Some RAF crews remained calm enough to make notes of the flashes for the Intelligence Officer. This salvo was well spaced on a south-easterly axis. The next one was even better and the third was the most accurate of all.
Whether using radar or visual sighting the aiming of an anti-aircraft gun is a complex skill. Both Lambert and Löwenherz were travelling at 240 mph, which required the shells to be aimed at a spot nearly one and a half miles ahead of them. Before each shot the fuse had to be set accurately and even if the target’s course remained constant the range kept changing with the angle of the gun.
The rearmost shell of this salvo exploded seventy-one feet from Löwenherz’s port motor. The theoretical lethal radius of an exploding 10.5-cm shell was fifty feet. This one fragmented into 4,573 pieces of which twelve weighed over one ounce, 1,525 weighed between one ounce and a fiftieth of an ounce and 3,036 were fragments of less than a fiftieth of an ounce.
Twenty-eight fragments hit Löwenherz’s Junkers. Four pieces penetrated the port motor and others went into the wing and fuselage. The antlers were wrenched out of his hands as the ailerons were torn and buffeted by the shockwave. The port motor’s oil pressure and boost dropped, then the oil temperature shot out of its marked place and swept clockwise. The motor was losing oil rapidly. Mrosek could see it escaping into the air looking, not dark and turbid, but white and sugary.
Löwenherz put the nose down and closed the fuelcock. Then he gave the port motor a burst of throttle to use up the last of the fuel and thus lessen the fire risk. Feather the prop, ignition off, extinguisher on. He’d done the whole thing while subconsciously remembering the positions of neighbouring airfields. None was very near. Valkenburg, the nearest, was right under the stream; he didn’t fancy that. In the moonlight ahead he saw the complex pattern of the islands and estuaries of Zeeland where outfalls of the great rivers of Europe fought a meandering battle with the low flat lands of Holland.
He recognized this coast. He’d done many forced landings here – in nightmares just before he awoke. Dump the fuel. He pulled the top off the emergency box beside his seat. The fuel came out of his tail like a fine silvery feather fifty feet long, glistening in the cold moonlight. He closed the cooling gills on the failed motor and gave the good motor a trifle more power. Then he changed the trim to keep her nose high. It was exactly like the emergency instructions in the instruction manual, except that the author of that manual had never flown on one motor in a plane with radar aerials stuck into the nose like a toasting-fork. He watched the ‘turn and bank’ indicator and saw that the Junkers was flying lopsided. It was sinking at five metres a second according to the variometer and he couldn’t lessen the rate of descent. The altimeter crawled backwards.
‘Strap tight,’ said Löwenherz to his white-faced crew. The Ju88 was not an easy aircraft to force-land on one motor. They had all watched one burst into flame at the end of Kroondijk’s main runway only seven weeks ago.
Löwenherz looked at the man beside him. Not a word was exchanged, but Löwenherz was convinced by the look.
‘Bale out.’ Mrosek wrestled with the floor hatch but it had been damaged and would not open. He looked up at Löwenherz in desperation.
Löwenherz detached the rear part of the cockpit cover and it flew off with a terrible roar that left them in an icy gale that whined and hissed across the edges of the windscreen. It spoiled the trim, so he touched the wheel to bring the nose down. Mrosek went first. Carefully he tucked his Zeiss binoculars inside his tunic. ‘Lost in action’ – he would not be asked to account for them. Agile as ever, he climbed out through the top like an acrobat. One of his boots swung dangerously near to Löwenherz’s head, then he had wriggled clear. At first it seemed a perfect job, but a nasty thump told them that the slipstream had batted him back against the plane’s tail. The slipstream threw him forward so that the binoculars crushed his rib-cage and broke four ribs. Tumbling head over heels his wrist struck the leading edge of the port tailplane and the fin gave his head a glancing blow before he was sucked away in a slipstream of fuel spraying from the jettison pipe. Overcome by the fuel and the blow on his head Mrosek fell 3,000 feet. Then night air blowing across his soaked clothing refrigerated him. Without fully regaining consciousness he pulled the ripcord and floated down under his canopy safely into a potato field.
Sachs had always been a bit timid. Löwenherz had seen his papers and knew that the pilot’s section and officer candidate board had both failed him because of this. Löwenherz decided that he would need more than just an order. Especially to use the top escape exit.
‘If you don’t go immediately, I’m going to jump and leave the aeroplane to you.’ Sachs climbed out then. Armed with the sort of luck that life had always provided for this rich young radar man, he was carried well clear and made a perfect descent.
The first sharp pang that Löwenherz had felt at the moment of the explosion had by now become a dull wet ache. It was as though an uncomfortably hot barber’s towel had been pressed against his belly and wrapped around his middle. Its cause was a broken fragment of a knurled brass pin from the flak shell’s nose-cone fuse. The pin had punched a tiny hole in the stressed metal skin of the aircraft’s nose and split into three parts after hitting the gyro compass. This piece, weighing only one-sixtieth of an ounce, entered Löwenherz’s belly. It passed through the abdominal wall and the peritoneal cavity, puncturing his ascending colon. It began to tumble as it lost speed, chewing its way through small arteries and a kidney before cracking open one of his lumbar vertebrae. There it nestled against his spinal cord, compressing it slowly.
It was not easy to hold the starboard wing down now that the motor had failed on that side and it was buffeting fiercely under his hands because of the damage to the metal wings and the tattered fabric of the ailerons themselves.
Löwenherz smiled grimly to himself. It was the very devil of a predicament. When he throttled back he began to lose height immediately. Yet with the good motor on full throttle to maintain height it carried him round in huge circles. No matter how much he tried to correct the turn with the ailerons it made little or no difference. The Ju88s were all like this, they needed a lot of rudder to turn them, and Löwenherz couldn’t even feel his feet, let alone use them upon the rudder bar. He pressed a hand upon his left knee to use his lower leg as one might use a stick to prod at the rudder, but the pain on his spine was terrible. He continued to do it until the moment when he almost blacked out.
He called up the Controller and told him briefly that he’d been hit and wounded and was heading due west over one of the great islands south of Rotterdam.
‘Get out, Katze One,’ called August Bach urgently.
‘Announcement: impossible,’ said Löwenherz. ‘I’ve damaged my back.’
‘Order: turn back.’
‘Losing height too fast. These damned aerials.’
‘Order: keep the radio on,’ said August. ‘We’ve switched the emergency service into the circuit. They’ll take a fix on you for the rescue boats. The Würzburg will hold you too.’
‘Thank you,’ said Löwenherz.
The life had drained from Löwenherz’s lower limbs so that only the upper part of him was truly alive. His vision was affected too: the red and green lights on his panel and the bright blue moonlight became a neutral grey. The noise of the one good engine seemed quieter and he wondered if that was why it could not hold the heavy Junkers in the air. The grey aeroplane descended down to the grey ocean and the flash it made as it hit the waves was grey like the water into which it sank.
Sadly the Würzburg at Ermine followed the Junkers out over the ocean until the blip became a phosphorescent glow that died away. The tube was blank except for a rain of interference.
When the great red flash appeared far out across the dark water a sentry phoned the Control Room to tell them.
‘He’s gone,’ said Willi. ‘The sentry saw the explosion.’
‘It’s always the best ones we lose.’
‘It was the Staffelkapitän,’ said Willi. ‘I know his voice.’
‘One of the best pilots we worked with.’
‘He was a count or a baron.’
‘Damned bad luck.’
‘That bloody flak ship.’
‘There was no way they could know, Willi.’
‘They’re probably painting a ring round one of the guns.’
‘Probably.’
Each of Creaking Door’s encounters with night fighters had lasted only a few seconds, but between those encounters had come the tension and tiring concentration of one hundred miles of cross-country instrument-flying. After he had evaded Beer by the sudden turn to starboard Lambert continued on, nervously examining every quarter of the sky, but soon it was clear that they had escaped from that attack.
Binty Jones said, ‘Skip, can Jimmy give me a break? I’ve got a touch of cramp.’
‘OK with you, Jimmy?’ Lambert said.
‘OK, Skip.’
‘Quickly, then.’
Lambert felt the trim change as first the wireless operator went back to the upper turret and then Binty climbed down from his seat in the roof and moved farther back to the Elsan just ahead of the tail. Jimmy Grimm, like most of the wireless operators, was a trained air gunner and he enjoyed the view that the turret afforded him. He touched the grips and the turret turned obediently, the machine guns tilting at the merest finger-touch. One of the worst aspects of the wireless operator’s job was the heated-air outlet that emerged near his seat. Even wearing the minimum of flying kit, Jimmy had become uncomfortably hot. He slipped one side of his helmet off and pressed his face against the ice-cold Perspex of the turret. It was like a long draught of cold beer.
‘OK, Jimmy?’
‘OK, Skip.’
Lambert saw the flicker of the navigator’s light as his curtain was pushed aside and guessed that Binty had come forward to the cockpit for a moment. Binty cherished a conviction that flying a bomber was little different from driving a motorcycle and he liked to watch Lambert’s activities and tried to commit them to memory. He noticed that the altimeter was steadily turning as they lost height. It was the usual procedure to exchange height for speed from the time the enemy coast was crossed on the return journey.
‘What about that photoflash, Binty? See if you can push it out, will you?’
‘Can someone give me a hand, Skipper?’
‘No,’ said Lambert.
‘I’ll give a hand, Skipper,’ offered Cohen.
‘OK,’ said Lambert. ‘See what you can do.’
The moonlight that revealed the bombers to the night fighters was also reassuring to an alert bomber crew. Löwenherz was still dancing through the puffy cumulus far behind them over Rotterdam and no one in Creaking Door was aware of his existence. Leutnant Beer had been assigned to a southern part of the Ermine sector. In short, there was not an enemy in sight. Over the ocean one would not expect an 8.8-cm flak gun, but even if by some magic one was there, Creaking Door was nearly three thousand feet higher than the effective range of an 8.8-cm flak gun.
Lambert was relating these facts to himself when a 10.5-cm shell – with its superior range – burst near Creaking Door’s tailplane. It came from the tail; a strangled thump. A giant’s belch that rumbled along the metal throat of stringers and formers. Then came the bad breath of cordite and burning, speeding on the wave of displaced air that pushed Lambert forward against the controls, shook the extinguishers loose and sent Kosher’s charts to fill the cockpit with fluttering paper. There was a flash of light too. That came from inside the fuselage. It made the screen turn white and blinded Lambert, whose eyes were adjusted to the dark night.
The control column came to meet Lambert’s belly and even with all his strength he could not prevent it coming. Door’s nose reared up like a frightened horse and the sound of the motors changed to a new note of anxiety.
‘Micky,’ said Lambert, ‘Micky,’ and Battersby rushed to his assistance, for he knew that he was the one that was needed. Binty Jones had been thrown to the floor by the explosion. As he picked himself up he knew that Door had been mortally hit. Then there was another great flash – bigger than any flak shell – a great white soundless explosion right under Door’s belly.
‘Take a look, Binty,’ said Lambert. ‘Back there.’
Binty got to his feet while Battersby put his foot on the pilot’s seat supports and pressed against the column as hard as he could. His face was beetroot red and the veins on his forehead shiny with exertion.
The controls remained unyielding, although, with little Battersby there to push, Lambert was able to hold them still. Lambert checked the other controls: the rudder bar was slopping from side to side and the trimmer wheels did not respond. The elevators were unmovable and all the time the aircraft’s nose was trying to come up. Both of them were using a lot of energy and Lambert doubted whether they could fight the column forward for the whole trip across the North Sea.
Binty pushed the navigator’s curtain aside and was met by a blinding green light. It was so unnatural that he crossed himself and wondered if they had entered Hell as a crew. The green light flickered and died. Suddenly it was pitch-dark and there was a stench of burning cordite and rags. Binty Jones edged aft through the darkness. He groped towards Kosher’s seat but he was not there. He continued climbing up over the main spar and past the bunk. The interior of the plane was billowing with smoke. Cautiously he stepped into it and walked as far as his turret before he saw the hole in the fuselage. He knew that the metal skin was thin and that a blow with a pencil’s end could drive a hole right through it, but that did not lessen the shock of seeing a gap big enough to drive a small car through.
Because the explosion had broken a section of metal skin away from its rivets and bent it back upon itself the hole was rectangular. The metal rattled angrily in the airstream like a monstrous letterbox flap. For a moment there was less smoke and Binty saw through the hole. There were tripods of grey searchlight beams somewhere near Rotterdam to the east of them, but the Lancaster was turning and the searchlights passed and the smoke closed in again.
‘Jesus!’ said Binty. He expected a reply from Jimmy Grimm in the turret but when he looked up he found that only the upper half of Jimmy remained. The leather-jacketed torso and masked head was staring over the gunsights as though ready to open fire, but the lower part of him was not there. There was just a boggy puddle of bone splinters, blood and liquidized viscera dumped on the floor and dripping from the flare stowage. Into it was pumping oil from the fractured pipes that led to the rear turret. Binty flashed his torch away from the obscene sight and steadied himself against the ice-cold metal skin of the fuselage.
